Advancing participatory communication

Enabling community dialogue

Promoting gender equality

Raising farmer’s voice

The United Nations had declared 2015 to be the International Year of Soils. In this interview, Ronald Vargas, Soils and Land Management Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, describes the many benefits of and threats to this natural resource, and underlines the importance of a sustainable approach to managing soils in the Post-2015 development agenda.

Fisheries play an important role in the economic and social life in Burundi. Yet, about 10 to 15% of the harvest was lost during the processing phase. Fish drying, which is the most common processing technique in the country, was done generally on bare ground. This has led to partial or total alteration of the products, and has considerably reduced both income and livelihoods all along the value chain.In response to these issues, FAO (the Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations) and the Burundi Fisheries Directorate started a project of 282,000 US dollars to improve fish processing method and reduce losses.

After struggling with the cost in time and other resources to deviate from established farming practices, some African women groups are finally taking the leap into the world of climate smart agriculture and they are getting results. This video highlights one such initiative resulting from a partnership between the East Africa Dairy Development project and some women groups in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.

To shed light on the concerns of smallholder farmers, more than 120 delegates representing governments, businesses, NGOs, research institutions and others met at a side event during the Sustainable Innovation Forum 2014 organized by Climate Action and UNEP in Lima to address these vital issues. Below are comments from some of the participants.

A woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo, living in a camp near Goma with her six children tells us her story. Once a month, she gets a call from a World Food Programme (WFP) operator and together, they discuss about what she and her children have been eating, and how they have been coping with food shortages. Funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, the mVAM project is piloting food security data collection through live and automated phone surveys.

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The following videos show community radio and participatory video projects based on ComDev methodologies accomplished in Africa. These informative videos demonstrate the effectiveness of participatory communication for rural development. The videos include as well a number of communication experts consultations (2006) that evidence the central role of communication for development in promoting rural development and eradicating food insecurity.